It’s essential to have some white space in our lives. I define white space as room to breathe. Breathing room is something that seems to be lacking in many of our lives and is the reason why many of us feel rushed, stressed and overwhelmed.
If you’re feeling frazzled and like there’s never enough time, it could be a signal that you don’t have enough white space in the following three areas of your life:
1. Travel/ commuting time
Leave some extra time whenever you need to travel to any destination so that you’re not constantly rushing. Also, it helps to have some breathing room if you suddenly find you need to fill your car with petrol (gas) or if there’s a traffic jam.
Stress is not fun so rather take some reading with you to use up any time if you don’t like to waste time. There is value though in just being and not having to do all the time.
2. Daily scheduling
Don’t schedule your appointments back to back all of the time. Yes, it’s a good idea to do batches of tasks but not when there’s no buffer space.
If you do some batching, give yourself a solid break after doing a couple of phone calls/ emails/ etc. E.g. If you’re on the phone from 9 – 12, leave some white space and start another type of activity after an hour or so. If you run over with the phone calls, you won’t feel stressed and anxious going into the next activity or group of tasks, feeling like you’re already behind.
3. Weekends
I know weekends are the time to catch up on things we might need to do from the week but please, leave some breathing time too.
Don’t schedule something for morning, afternoon and evening. Even two activities a day can feel like too much. We have a personal family boundary of only one social per weekend day, and preferably only one per weekend, although it somehow doesn’t feel like an extra social if we go somewhere directly after church.
I’m also guilty of having a to-do list a mile long for the weekend which…. never gets all done. I do schedule lots of down time to get reading, sorting out my house and weekly meal planning done though.
Can you think of an area or two where you can build in some more white space?
